The requisite blood-fest finale notwithstanding, a polished work of suspense.
Camp counselors run amuck in Lehmann-Haupt’s chilling second novel (following A Crooked Man, 1995), set in a rustic 1950s Pennsylvania boys’ camp.
This nicely handled thriller is narrated by 17-year-old Jerry Muller, the product of divorced parents, who returns to his beloved Camp Seneca as a junior counselor in the summer of 1952. Jerry takes with him his eager, impressionable nine-year-old half-brother, Peter, whom he must take care of in order to show his father and new stepmother how responsible he is. Unnerving changes have occurred at the camp, however, involving the arrival of Native American Buck Silverstone, aka Redclaw, who has been given free reign by the camp owners to scare the kids. (He begins by telling a campfire ghost story about a mad cook of a lodge in nearby Lake Pymatuning who wields a meat cleaver.) Buck claims the camp land is actually Seneca land, haunted by ghosts buried there, and subscribes to a hybrid religion embracing torture and mutilation. In the camp’s spirit of building character, Buck instigates several nasty scares, some of them turning violent. Jerry, who is still on crutches after breaking a leg in a skiing accident, acts as a kind of wary observer, and writes his reservations about the camp to his young German stepmother, Karla. Additional tension stems from issues related to class (Jerry is wealthy and educated, while the majority of campers are working class) and sex (Jerry’s male friend makes unwelcome advances).
The requisite blood-fest finale notwithstanding, a polished work of suspense.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-684-83427-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gloriously funny and involving fourth novel from the author of such comfortable-as-old-shoes fictions as Mohawk (1986) and Nobody's Fool (1993). Writing teacher William Henry Hank Devereaux Jr. is a one-shot novelist (Off the Road) who's settled into an embattled stint as department head at an academic sinkhole where he finds it prudent to simply tread water and go with the flow (anyway, promotion in an institution like West Central Pennsylvania University was a little like being proclaimed the winner of a shit-eating contest). Hank tries to keep his wits about him by adopting the philosophical principle known as Occam's Razor (that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon or problem is usually the correct one), but his life keeps getting in the way. A nearby married daughter is having husband trouble. The state legislature promises to eviscerate his departmental budget. Hank's crushes on various women, including a colleague's adult daughter, complicate his otherwise passive devotion to his no-nonsense wife Lily. And, in addition to possible prostate cancer, Hank is assailed by even more undignified woes: His nose is bloodied by a poet's notebook, and he's suspected (with good reason) of murdering a goose—and of even worse things—by a hilarious, vividly rendered cadre of fellow academics, townspeople, and students, each of whom is sharply individualized. Though the quests for tenure and priority are generously detailed, and though Hank's relationship with his long-absent father reaches a satisfying closure, plot is only secondary (or maybe tertiary or quaternary) in a Russo novel. This latest seduces and charms with its voice (i.e., Hank Devereaux's): Laconic, deadpan, disarmingly modest and self-effacing, it's the perfect vehicle for another of Russo's irresistible revelations of the agreeable craziness of everyday life. Besides, how can you not like a writing prof who counsels an overzealous student to Always understate necrophilia?
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43246-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Bursts with quirky spirit and gleeful comic energy.
A series of mostly undelivered letters from a vegan Whole Foods deli maid and Goddess worshiper to her slacker ex-boyfriend.
“Dear Everett, Perhaps I’ve invited you to move into my spare bedroom against my better judgment.” Judgment is not the long suit of Poxy Roxy—so dubbed by her evil supervisor, Dirty Steve, during a bout with chickenpox. Feeling adrift, she turns to columnist Dear Sugar for advice. “The best thing you can possibly do with your life is tackle the motherfucking shit out of it,” says Sugar, and to Roxy, this means organizing a campaign to take down the Lululemon store that is moving into the space once occupied by her beloved Waterloo Video—because Lululemon is not a funky local business. Meanwhile, she's right across the street at the behemoth Whole Foods flagship store, which erased the character of this supposedly historic intersection when it opened in 1980. Well, it used to be a funky local business, before Roxy was born. Only animal rights is a stronger motivator for Roxy than confused anti-corporate nostalgia. “Thank Goddess that Spider House is still going strong, despite the fact that Starbucks stores have spread through the city faster than an STD in a retirement home.” A clitoral masturbation cult, romantic liaisons with a skateboarder and a drummer, a feud with her meth-head neighbors, the near death of her weiner dog due to choking on the crotch of her pleather underpants—the predicaments never stop for our millennial heroine. Lowry is the heir apparent to Sarah Bird, whose comic novels Alamo House and The Boyfriend School perfectly captured the Austin of the 1980s. Roxy would love them. We will always remember this as the book that taught us the word “kyriarchy.” Look it up.
Bursts with quirky spirit and gleeful comic energy.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2143-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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